A hybrid centralized-Distributed Mobility Management for supporting highly mobile users

Distributed Mobility Management (DMM) is a new trend to overcome the limitations of the current IP mobility management protocols raised by the rapid increasing mobile Internet usages. It is based on the idea of flattening the network architecture and providing mobility service when it is necessary. Although DMM outperforms the well known protocol - Proxy Mobile IPv6 (PMIPv6) in terms of optimizing the network resources consumption, the DMM deployment faces several challenges such as complex address and tunnel management, high signaling cost and high handover latency when the number of addresses and tunnels associated with the mobile node increase (e.g., in case of users moving at a high speed). For this reason, we introduce a hybrid centralized-distributed mobility management architecture (H-DMM) for supporting highly mobile users. The numerical results showed that H-DMM can retain the advantages of DMM while limiting its drawback in comparison with PMIPv6 in terms of signaling cost, packet delivery cost, handover latency and end-to-end delay even in case of users with highly mobility features.